


charcoal and dirt

by peaksykid



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, coffee cup, depiction of flashbacks/traumatic memories, jess has some ambiguous weird phone powers, macchiato city is a real place in this one, man of course it had to be the team jess was on that witnessed all those percolations huh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:54:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27757987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peaksykid/pseuds/peaksykid
Summary: “Oh,” she said finally, “that’s really cool! I never did meet the old--” she stopped herself, thinking better of it-- “the Commissioner in person before.”He smiled kind of sheepishly, and laughed a little bit, and said “That’s me!” and Jess felt a whole bunch of emotions at once, worry and fondness and warmth, and a strong sense of "get out of here, kid, you’re too good for this world."----Nobody sleeps in Macchiato City, and one sleepless night, Jess finds herself thinking about what she's seen.
Relationships: Parker MacMillan IIII & Jessica Telephone
Comments: 16
Kudos: 51





	charcoal and dirt

Just after Game Three of the second series, while the rest of the team is out strategizing or partying or whatever it is they’re doing this time to keep awake, the flickering orange-grey light of a tall Macchiato City streetlamp points itself down on Jessica Telephone, as she sits, legs crossed, on a cold park bench, staring out at the pond.

It isn’t the first time she’s come to this particular City park, but then again, she isn’t quite sure. Like most things about the City, if you think about it too hard, it gets fuzzy, and so nobody thinks about it too hard. Especially not Jess. When you’d been in the game for as long as she had, you stopped questioning things after a while.

The pond is wide, shallow, and still. She gets the sense that during the day, kids probably push little sailboats around in it with sticks, fighting over who gets which one with their siblings and parents, but she’s never actually visited during the day, so she can’t say for sure. For now, only the streetlamps light it up, in dim and tentative ovals of light around the edges, and the occasional autumn leaf from the park’s trees disturbs the stillness, making ripples that extend only just so far before fading out into dispersal.

She doesn’t really know why she came out to the park. Part of it was probably her miserable performance at that last de Calf game. Last up to bat, team down by only half a run, and she’d choked. Hit a ground out and the game was done, and the disappointment from the stands was palpable in a way that felt like ice down her back. 

She figures, as much as the team may probably be planning their shiny new “macc comebacc” as the fans liked to yell, none of them would particularly want to see her face right now. So maybe she’s sulking. Just a little bit. Nobody ever said she _personally_ had to be a good splort about things, as far as she knew that wasn’t in the Book, and even if it was, she doesn’t want to talk to anybody about it right now.

Besides. If they had wanted to talk to her they would’ve called her. Gods know enough people call her anyway.

She sets down her to-go cup of coffee, and puts her head in her hands. There’s a sense of discontentment in her, sharp and low-volume and mumbling unintelligibly, as she is again lost in thought.

Mac City was something she’d been _excited_ about, dammit. Kansas was nice enough, and the Mints were all sweet people, sweeter than sweet tea or hard candy or cherry pie, but the wind out on the prairie was cold. She’d had far too many nights where she found herself staying up late in a shed out past the edges of the field, wired in and hooked up to an old switchboard from who knows when, calling every number she could remember and hearing nothing but disconnect and static on the other end. Too many absent hours with the receiver pressed hard to her ear standing in the cornfield like it was going to tell her something. Too much free time spent flicking through the limited number of channels on the old-style TV in her apartment, late into the evening, till the local news anchors for these little clusters of farm towns signed off and the screen was just a test card, mocking the passage of time with its colorbars pattern, gray yellow teal green pink red blue.

It was too quiet out there. You started to notice quiet when you’d spent a year with the _ringing_ filling up every extra space in your head, you started to hate the quiet because it reminded you it was missing, reminded you that something in you was disconnected from something greater or maybe just something that for once in your life matched your tone and volume. You started to wish you were anywhere but where you were.

Jess hadn’t hated Kansas, honest. She’d be fine going back there whenever it was that regular seasons started up again. Promise.

But Mac City had seemed _cool_ to her in a way that things rarely did anymore. It had been so long since she’d been awake and free in a big city, so long since she’d been able to lose herself in a throng of people on a busy street, since she’d been able to open up all her channels and listen in on a thousand voices talking to each other across a thousand different lines, to be surrounded by the communication of others and not have to worry as much about her own. To be alone in a crowd, for her, was far better than being alone in a windswept field, and when she’d found out she was going to be on the Mac City team there was a part of her that was genuinely excited, like back in the old days, when the game really was just a game.

The teams would stay in these strange places, these temporary but simultaneously always-had-been-there towns that played host to the Coffee Cup contest, for a few months before the actual series started--training, getting ready, drinking in the atmosphere of the place. And Jess had loved it, when she got there for the first time, stepping off the plane and tapping all her buttons on to hear the _sound_ of this city, the unique thrumming frequency and tone of it that flowed between each tall tower. She’d looked up at the glowing skyline and she’d smiled.

\----

Once she’d gotten everything set up in her apartment, she’d been busy almost immediately. She had been named batting captain, after all, and while there wasn’t anything official right away on paper to explain what the hell that meant, she figured it meant taking care of and working on training with her teammates, running batting practice at the cages and keeping herself in good shape. Everyone was at different levels of rustiness from the siesta--some had kept up their practicing, others had strayed intentionally as far away from it as possible, still others pretended like they had been practicing the whole time but whiffed when Burke tossed them even a slow one (looking at you, Fish, we know you spent the past year showing off and swimming instead of even touching a bat.)

It was on one of those days, or rather nights, as it seemed to be night more than day in Mac City, that Jess had returned to her apartment, arms full of her batting bag and some freshly-printed captain paperwork and whatever else she’d brought to practice, and promptly ran right into something and tripped in front of her door, falling flat on her face.

She fumbled, with a startled beeping sound, dropping everything everywhere, perfect balance momentarily thrown off. Instinctively, upon getting up, her hand went to her hip, and followed the cord of the Dial Tone up to make sure it was still safe and attached and wrapped around her arm, before she slung it over her shoulder again and went about picking up everything she’d thrown on the ground. 

Engrossed in gathering the mess, she almost didn’t hear it, the eager, friendly tone of the voice of the person she’d run into.

“Oh! I’m so sorry about that! I didn’t mean to get in your way, oh geez--”

The person was picking up some of the captain paperwork, and they thrust a whole bundle of it into Jess’s arms, with the force of someone just a bit panicked that they’d made a mistake.

She looked up and then down at them as she stood. They were an almost definitively nondescript looking figure, lanky but a little shorter than her, messy curly hair fallen over their eyes, button-up polo with a little wooden bat and ball embroidered into the pocket, and four vertical marks embroidered below that--she read it first as four I’s, like an odd sort of Roman numeral, but then wondered whether they might be tally marks.

“I hope you’re alright, I’m sorry for running into you! I was worried that I’d just missed you,” the person was saying. They picked up more of the paperwork from the ground, trying as best they could to get it into a neat pile, but Jess could see that at least half the pages were upside down.

“Missed me?” she said, finally, her voice coming out softer than she expected, a little distortion and static on the end of the word like it always did when she was caught off guard.

“Yeah! I’ve been going around and trying to meet all of the players, to say hello, y’see, since I’ve not met all of them yet,” they said, “and I realized I hadn’t even gotten to you yet, which is embarrassing, cause everyone says you’re so famous and you were probably waiting all this time, and--”

They continued to babble on, and Jess looked down to notice the lunchbag slung around their shoulder, and the coffee stain on their shirt.

“Slow down,” she said, trying to force her voice into a calming and not intimidating tonality. “It’s alright, don’t worry. You wanna come sit inside?” She fiddled with the key in the door while the figure sputtered a thanks.

Her apartment was cozy, blue-lit from the view of the seemingly never-ending City outside. She set the paperwork down on her desk, slung her batting bag and hat up on a hook, and briefly looked in the mirror to try and pat down a little bit of the frizz that haloed her head. The Dial Tone stayed clipped to her hip as always, silent now save for its usual faint buzzing sound that only she could really hear.

The visitor sat down gingerly on the couch, like they were afraid of damaging it, or like they were almost unsure how to sit down properly. Jess switched on a light and some LED’s that surrounded the windowpane, and flopped into her armchair by the window, exhaling for a second and forgetting that there was someone else in her apartment.

What was she doing sitting down? She shook her head--no, she should be a good host. She got up again.

“Do you want some water? Coffee? You look a little flushed,” she said.

“No, thanks, that’s very nice of you,” a pause, “Well, I guess I could have some water, thank you.”

She poured them both glasses and set them down on old geometric coasters on the coffee table. She’d make herself her signature macchiato later, but not now, it took too long.

The figure was already gulping down the water with vigor. When they finished, they looked up with what felt like genuine sparkles in their eyes.

“So you said you were going around meeting all the players?” Jess asked. “Sounds like a lot of work. There are a whole lot of us, and we’re spread out across all these, cities--” she had been going to say “new cities”, but the word wouldn’t leave her mouth, so she didn’t push it.

“Well, I figured it would be a great first thing for me to do!” Their tone changed up a little, the brightness and eagerness of it now tinged with confidence, pride in their role. “I promised to be transparent and accountable and all of that, and you guys are all my best friends, and--”

“Wait wait,” Jess said, setting her glass down, a little perplexed. “I didn’t catch your name.”

“Parker!” A pause. “MacMillan,” and another pause, a little longer, “the Fourth. And I’m the Commissioner of Internet League Blaseball!” A swell of pride, then an addition. “Well, intern-interim, but...yeah.” 

Oh.

Jess had, honestly, not paid a lot of attention to the whole trial business. Whatever it was that they had even been on about was something she hadn’t been present for, or rather, hadn’t been mentally concerned with at the time, and it seemed like just another squabble in the realm of the heavens that for once, she wasn’t obligated to pay attention to. She didn’t know anyone who had been involved directly with it, and every incident she heard about afterward that had happened there sounded more confusing than the last, so she considered it a blessing that she didn’t have a clue what was going on in there.

She did know that apparently Parker the Third, the Commissioner, had died. It had been all over the news in the weeks afterward, and some people had been really shook up about it. Jess didn’t...She had never properly met the guy, or known him as anything other than the person who announced election results or gave periodic updates between seasons. And...with how everything had been, these past several years, he, like so many other pieces of the game, had blended into the background, like so many layers of static.

She’d heard they’d gotten a new one, but again, hadn’t paid much attention. The old Parker had been somehow eternally youthful, as was this one, old enough that you figured he could somewhat handle having a job but young enough that you still wanted to instinctively call him “kid”. She wracked her brain trying to remember exactly what the old Parker looked like but couldn’t come up with anything. If you asked her, she probably would say “like this one does”, but it was almost as if something was filling in the blanks hastily with pencil, in messy handwriting.

Now that he’d identified himself, she could definitely see it, the strange tinge of _freshly made_ about him. He blinked a little bit too long, looking back at her, and his hair, though floppy, almost felt like it was formed that way, perpetually pushed just a little to the side, from a wind she couldn’t see. If she opened her channels, she suspected she’d hear something whirring, or maybe gurgling in a more organic way, or maybe even radio silence, absence, nothing at all.

“Oh,” she said finally, “that’s really cool! I never did meet the old--” she stopped herself, thinking better of it-- “the Commissioner in person before.”

He smiled kind of sheepishly, and laughed a little bit, and said “That’s me!” and Jess felt a whole bunch of emotions at once, worry and fondness and warmth, and a strong sense of _get out of here, kid, you’re too good for this world_. She blinked, and tapped a few buttons on her hip out of sight, and tried to turn down her ambient sensitivity, even if he didn’t see a thing.

“I wanted to give you these,” he said, fumbling around in the lunchbox, and coming up with two things--a bag of fancy-looking coffee grounds, and a Zliploc pouch with a couple of crumbly scones inside. “I figured a good way to make friends is to just be friendly! And I made scones, too.” he said.

She reached over for the bag, and before she could even touch it, he blurted out, “I made sure these ones weren’t made anywhere near anything with peanuts in them, since I know you and some other people are allergic, so you don’t have to worry!”

Jess stared down at the bag in her hands, and for a split second had to hold back a tear. She was surprised at her sentimentality, but it hit her anyway, like a wave of velvet something beyond, and she was taken aback.

It had been a long time since someone had just...done something kind for her like that, without being asked or without having some ulterior motive or wanting an autograph in return, or without judging her reaction for sufficiently gleaming idol-worthiness or alluring mystery, or without even being on her team. She stared down at the scones and at the rumpled edge of the bag of grounds, ran over it with her finger, trying to smooth it out.

It felt like something she’d lost a long time ago, somewhere where the sun beat down heavy and dusty, somewhere that smelled like home-cooked food, like the lazy distortion wafting up off of a heating surface. Like two out of two, like the click of hanging up.

“Are you okay?” 

She looked up. She’d almost forgotten he was there.

“I’m alright, don’t worry,” she said, voice cracking just a little into a beeping sound mid-”worry”. “Thank you, really. That’s really nice of you.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Parker was quiet too, though he didn’t seem sad or put off by her silence. He didn’t fidget or even really move, just sort of remained where he had put himself, as if he didn’t know anything else to do with his form.

The silence wasn’t uncomfortable, just present. After a while, and a few more sips of water between the two of them, he spoke up again.

“I think my team might be playing yours first!” he said, bright eyed as ever. “Don’t tell anybody that yet, though, I don’t think I’m supposed to be telling you.”

He didn’t even know to keep team secrets from his opponent, she thought. Poor kid. 

“Oh!” she said, trying to keep the wobble out of her voice. “I didn’t know you were...playing.” _The Commissioner never played before_ , she didn’t say.

“I only just found out this week! Me and some other people from the ILB offices are on a team, anyways, and we’ve just started our practices. I’ve never gotten to play before, and it’s really great!”

“Wow,” she said, fidgeting with the edge of the bag in her hands again.

“The schedule will probably come out in a couple weeks, so everybody’ll see then, but I’m still excited,” he admitted. “Your team has so many good players on it! I bet it will be a great series.”

“I’m sure it will,” she said, and meant it, as much as anyone could mean it in this line of work.

“Well,” he said, standing up and dusting off his pants, “I should probably get going. There’s more players I’m trying to visit today while I’m here in Macchiato City, and I don’t want them to be left out!”

He was already heading out the door, and Jess was still staring at the bag of scones. She made herself look up and meet his eyes.

“Stay safe out there, alright?” she found herself saying.

“What?” he said, tilting his head slightly like some sort of inquisitive bird. Then, “Of course!” A pause. “I mean, I always do.”

Jess didn’t let herself think about how short of an interval “always” must cover for him, or how he’d probably never seen any real reason to need to “be safe” while playing blaseball. Jess made herself smile and made her hand move from the receiver on her hip to wave at him as he headed out, and made herself stay looking outward until the door closed behind him.

Once he was gone, she sat, a little shakily, down in the armchair across from where he had been, across from the window where the City stood watch, silent and blinking lights as always, as always. She didn’t move, just stared out at the buildings, and traced their outlines with her gaze, making waveforms in her mind, listening to the sound of them.

\----

Call it fate, call it destiny, call it splidey-sense, call it whatever, but as things had started to happen to Jess--and happen, and happen, and happen--she had started to understand their rhythm. To recognize, instinctively, what such events felt like passing her by, to know the vibration of the air and the low humming in her ear before lightning struck or an ump lowered its mask, the movement of weather patterns miles and miles away. 

It had started--when had it started?--she knew when it had started, because it was an extension, she knew, of what people say about twins, of how you know when something horrible is going to happen to the other, even miles and miles away, and you feel it in your own bones, even as the heat sinks into theirs. And it didn’t have a tether now, and it spread out everywhere, thin and flimsy but nevertheless present. It had started when she became one out of one instead of one out of two, and it had never stopped since.

It wasn’t _precognition,_ no, not like those folks on the Sunbeams had, or even like some other proper form of it. She didn’t know what exactly was going to happen, when she felt it, or even when. Just a sense, that something _would_ happen, or was about to, and the dread and fear that accompanied that, the inherent powerlessness of witnessing from behind glass, of overhearing from the other end of a call. 

It’s why she never told people about it. They would ask, she knew, whether something was going to happen to them, and she had no way to explain to them that even if it did, she couldn’t _tell_ them, it didn’t work that way.

She’d looked at Parker and felt that feeling, and it hadn’t felt good. It had felt _familiar,_ in a way that made something inside of her flicker almost adjacent to that familiar rhythm, like it used to, a long time ago, and then very briefly one last time, and then never again. But it had also felt like silence on the other end of the line where there should be breathing. Like red sky in the morning out on the prairie. Like howling out down across the Styx. Like the sound of hollow tapping on the outside of a splintery, rigid wall.

She knew in her heart something bad was going to happen to that kid, and she knew more than anything she couldn’t do a thing about it.

\----

So of course, when it came to that fateful week itself, four games into a five game series, after she’d seen--what, nine players? nine?--get caught midstride in this...horrible beam of light from above, watched it freeze their motion fully and completely as their eyes widened like china plates and pull them up, up, higher to someplace none of them could see, and heard that awful squelching, melting, liquid sound ring out across the field, and saw nothing come up to take their place--she had at least a bit of an idea of what was coming.

Mac City was _crushing_ it in that fourth game, and she couldn’t even feel good about it in a splorting way, because half the other fucking team was gone. Like, _gone_ gone, like “this isn’t even a fair fight” gone, they weren’t even _replacing_ them. They brought out some sort of kettle contraption last game, when the light had taken every single last one of their pitchers one by one, and it was a miserable pitcher. She’d hit a two-run homer off of it and watched it puff out a sad little bit of steam and felt absolutely awful.

It wasn’t that Jess had never seen death before. Gods know she had seen plenty of death before. This just...it felt different. It felt like something from, pardon the expression, out of left field. She knew what incineration was like. That had a logic to it, a frequency, a sonic temperature that she could pin down. She didn’t know what this...beam thing wanted, or how it worked, or even really what it was doing.

She just knew that every time that that beam came down something in her head started up its ringing all at once, colors all aswirl behind her eyes, so close to like before and yet like it never ever had, and she couldn’t look at it directly, and when it left, her temples ached like something loud had gone off right in front of her face.

She sat in the dugout between innings and thought about Parker, probably shivering in the other dugout at that very moment as she fidgeted with the laces on her cleat. She wondered whether she should call him. She wondered whether it was even worth it.

They won that game 13-6. She went home to her apartment that night with her head down, coffee in hand. It tasted like lavender.

No one had been taken that day. She wondered if maybe, just maybe, she had been wrong. Then shook her head. She was never wrong, about this type of thing. The static, the humming, hitched a little in her head, and then kept on steady.

There was only one game left in the series. She should call him. She should call him and warn him, give him one last opportunity, a fighting chance, she thought. She thought about how he had wobbled on his feet when she told him to stay safe, like he had never had to compute and process the idea that he wouldn’t be. 

She put her hand with its red glazed nails on the receiver of the Dial Tone on her hip and tried to make herself pick it up, but she couldn’t make it happen. It felt heavy like a pull from some distant gaseous planet had ahold of it, and the sound in her head went loud if she pulled it hard enough. She tried once, twice, three times for luck, and struck out, thoughts ringing, and went to bed, and lay there all night, like everyone in Mac City did, staring out at the skyline until morning came.

She held her breath, that whole next game the following day. As much as she could. She didn’t know why she was so _concerned_ all of a sudden, about some weird artificial player-clone-thing she barely knew, but every time he came up to bat she had been stifling something in her throat that wanted to scream, _get out of here kid you’re too good for this world, get out of here kid while you still can_ , and she couldn’t make it go away, couldn’t banish it from her head.

In the third inning, it came down and it took one of the other players. She didn’t even know their name. Nobody on that team had even tried to talk to hers inbetween games, and she’d never met any of them, save for Parker. She tried to look away from the beam, but she still heard it, and still felt the void left where a player used to be, the gap in the air that rushed in like a gust of wind.

This is how it goes. He comes up to bat in the fifth inning and chugs three consecutive cups of coffee. He places the takeaway cardboard cups neatly on the side of the batting barrier, lined up three in a row, in between each instance. She wonders how he can stand it.

 _Focus, Jess_ , she tells herself, like she used to when she--when the two of them were kids, when she was nervous, when she was the one in the field and he was the one at bat and she felt this fear in her throat even back when there was nothing to be afraid of. 

He hits a ground out, the inning ends, she lets out a breath and nearly falls forward on her feet. 

It’s like running in a dream, the next innings are. She doesn’t come up to bat until the seventh, and it’s getting to be too much for her to look, the feeling, and she closes her eyes when it’s her turn and somehow hits a home run anyway, the Dial Tone humming in her hands like it’s leading her, the way it always does when she doesn’t have the strength to lead herself. She’s keeping her eyes shut all the way around the bases, trying desperately to trust it, to trust fate, to trust knowing just in case it turns out right. 

It’s the bottom of the seventh inning now, and she is standing at her position, and she knows that Parker is up to bat, and she is forcing her eyes shut. 

She doesn’t see him chug yet another cup of coffee, glossy, artificial hand shaking from the caffeine, but she hears it, hears the liquid pour into the waxed cardboard, and she hears the little tck-tck of him setting the cup down along the railing with the other three--one, two, three, four, she counts them in her head, she knows their position like she knows the buttons on her face--and she hears him turn again towards the pitcher.

Jess hears it descending. Jess doesn’t want to look, but her eyes betray her.

His frozen body makes eye contact with her, locks its vision onto hers, and for a second, it’s not Parker, his eyes suddenly lit up with light and seeming and photons _,_ his messy-yet-molded hair floating up from his forehead against gravity, his grip on the bat horribly rigid, but it’s _Seb,_ and he’s _scared,_ and he’s _burning_ , and she can _hear_ his frequency and she can _hear_ the molecules coming apart one by one and she can feel the tether in her unraveling like something stretched too far like she’s gone out of range like it’s been pulled out of her range of service like it did three years ago when her eyes were red and his eyes were blue until they weren’t and the sound was there until it wasn’t. 

And then, as quickly as it comes, it is gone, and it’s Parker again, and he is clinging to his bat with his fingernails, and it’s barely there anymore, worn down to the quick, and his face is _dripping, liquidizing,_ and he’s still looking right at her with wobbly pupils, and she sees his mouth struggle to to form the shape of her name to call out for help, for anything, and like always, like fucking always, she can’t do a thing.

\----

And she’s sitting on a bench at a pond in Mac City, and her nails are digging into her cup so hard that the coffee is dripping down her hand.

She takes a sip, forearm shaking. It tastes like charcoal and dirt.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to SIBR/Reblase for the game records, which were super helpful, and to the wonderful place known as Crabitat Wrigen for being cool.
> 
> Also, explanation of the title--at some point in the second round of the Cup, Jess got Poured Over by a "double roast blending charcoal and dirt". Jess. Why are you drinking that.


End file.
